Does patient need interpreter services?
Identify need early in the process
If patients are financially cleared and pre-registered before they present for services, this situation give you the opportunity to obtain demographic information, but do you also consider the patient’s need for an interpreter at that point?
“We have a window of opportunity to identify the patients coming into our facility that will need some form of interpreter services,” says Jacqueline Doerman, patient access services manager at the Patient Accounts & Access Center at OSF Healthcare in Peoria, IL.
At Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland, many documents given at registration are translated into the major languages seen in its hospitals and clinics, including Spanish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Vietnamese.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has requirements for providing interpreter services, and Medicare Conditions of Participation also require providing interpreter services and available documents be available in the major languages served, notes Ronald Marcum, MD, director of the organization’s integrity office.
“The documents are translated through our interpreter services using the same qualification requirements used for direct medical care,” says Marcum. The documents that are readily available in other languages include the Notice of Privacy Practices, many standard instructions for patients for medical conditions, and a number of educational documents informing patients about their illness.
OSF Healthcare’s financial clearance center calls patients having high-dollar diagnostic testing, so a need for an interpreter is sometimes identified then, says Doerman. “We also have a notification in our computer system if someone will require an interpreter,” she says.
At Cincinnati (OH) Children’s Hospital Medical Center, scheduling center agents use a script at the point of scheduling to assess if an interpreter is needed. “We try to do the assessment before the patient gets here, but sometimes we don’t discover that an interpreter is needed until the patient arrives at registration,” says Michelle Gray, MHA, director of patient access and outpatient registration.
Registrars don’t have patients sign any consent paperwork that isn’t in the patient’s native language, adds Gray. “Our challenge is not having everything translated in all languages we would like to have,” she says. “It probably isn’t realistic to have everything you need translated in every language as patients present.” (See related story, p. 8, on training patient access staff as interpreters.) Here are ways patient access leaders are meeting the needs of non-English speaking patients:
• At OSF Healthcare, registrars have access to interpreters as well as a mobile interpreter cart.
The video remote cart (manufactured by Wenatchee, WA-based InDemand Interpreting) allows registrars to communicate through an interpreter in the patient’s native language via videoconferencing. (For more information, see resource at end of this article.) “This cart was tested at one of our facilities with great success and was, therefore, implemented at two other locations,” says Doerman. “Training sessions were offered to our staff to know how to operate the cart.”
• Patient access employees at Cincinnati Children’s are encouraged to identify documents that need translation in a specific language.
If a registrar notices a significant number of patients are native speakers of a particular language, he or she might be unaware how to make a request for documents to be translated in that language.
“We need to do a little better job of empowering our frontline people to say, ‘This document needs to be translated,’” says Ricardo A. Torres, CMI, CFLI, manager of linguistic services for the hospital’s Office of Diversity & Inclusion.
“It’s important that we let people know what the process is to get something translated, so they are part of the solution to identify gaps,” says Torres. “We rely heavily on the various staff members. If they say a document is not available in a particular language, we get that translated as soon as possible.”
• At Cincinnati Children’s, documents that involve consent aren’t being sight-translated (read out loud to the patient in his or her native language) to be consistent with the way this situation is handled with English-speaking patients.
“In reality, not even English-speaking people are reading the entire documents,” Torres explains. “They rely on the provider to understand what they are signing. We encourage our providers to go over the consent just like they would with an English-speaking patient.”
Sources/Resource
For more information on meeting the needs of non-English speaking patients, contact:
• Jacqueline Doerman, Patient Access Services Manager, Patient Accounts & Access Center, OSF Healthcare, Peoria, IL. Phone: (309) 683-6765. Fax: (309) 683-6792. Email: [email protected].
• Michelle C. Gray, MHA, Director, Patient Access/Outpatient Registration, Cincinnati (OH) Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Phone: (513) 636-1414. Fax: (513) 636-7531. E-mail: [email protected].
• Ronald G. Marcum, MD, Director, Integrity Office, Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, Portland. Phone: (503) 494-8849. Email: [email protected].
• Ricardo A. Torres, CMI, CFLI, Manager of Linguistic Services, Office of Diversity & Inclusion, Cincinnati (OH) Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Phone: (513) 636-9930. Email: [email protected].
• InDemand Interpreting provides video remote interpreting services for the healthcare industry, accessed over stationary, cart-mounted and mobile video-capable computing devices. Customers pre-pay for minutes using bundled service plans that include the provisioning of end-user interpreting stations, based on the number of minutes in their plan. For more information, contact InDemand Interpreting, Wenatchee, WA. Phone: (877) 899-3824. Email: [email protected].
If patients are financially cleared and pre-registered before they present for services, this situation give you the opportunity to obtain demographic information, but do you also consider the patients need for an interpreter at that point?You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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